Today -100: June 30, 1926: Headses or tails

Mussolini, worried about Italy’s balance of trade and determined to increase Italian production, orders the work day increased from 8 hours to 9. He also bans the building of more expensive houses for a year and cafes, bars, night clubs etc. indefinitely. Gasoline for cars will be mixed with wine. The newspapers which he hasn’t already banned will be restricted to 6 pages.

The Italian public prosecutor’s office finds no evidence that the Socialist former deputy Tito Zaniboni’s attempt to assassinate Mussolini last year was instigated by the Freemasons.

The Treasury will mint a Sesquicentennial half-dollar coin with portraits of Coolidge and Washington, the first time a living president will appear on a US coin. That was illegal then like it’s illegal now. I had assumed Mr. C. and Mr. W. would appear on opposite sides, but actually...

That really is terrible. Also, the Sesquicentennial celebrates the birth of the nation at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and neither Washington nor Coolidge signed the Declaration of Independence. The Liberty Bell appears on the other side. 1 million of these things were minted, to be sold at the Exposition; 859,000 went unsold and were melted down.

New York Democrats are carefully scrutinizing the speech Gov. Al Smith gave at a dinner to determine whether he might be convinced to run for re-election 4 months from now.

Coolidge denies saying fishing is a sport only for youths.

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Today -100: June 29, 1926: Of Wing-Dings, vets, whips, and ironsides

The Governor General of Canada, Julian Byng, known, naturally, as “Bungo,” refuses Prime Minister Mackenzie King’s request to dissolve Parliament and call new elections. He is the first and last governor general to reject such a request. The most recent election was only last October and Byng thinks Arthur Meighen (C) should be allowed to try to form a government before there’s resort to another election. So King and his Cabinet, facing a motion of confidence over bribe-taking in the Customs Department and other scandals, resign. Meighen will try to form a Conservative government backed by only a plurality in Parliament (King’s Liberals have been ruling in a shaky coalition with the Progressives).

This is called the King–Byng Affair, or the King–Byng Wing-Ding. Those wacky Canadians.

The Senate passes a bill amending the World War Veterans’ act to provide hospitalization benefits for women veterans and nurses from the Spanish-American War in private hospitals, since VA hospitals are men-only.

The Educational Committee of the Prussian Diet rejects a Socialist motion to abolish corporal punishment in schools. Failing that, they tried to abolish it for girls. Then for 6-year-olds. But Prussians love them some whipping.

During the filming of “Old Ironsides,” a Wallace Beery film (with Boris Karloff in what I assume is a small role) which I haven’t seen but which is available on Tubi, a cannon explodes, destroying the masts, sending six extras falling to the deck. One is dead.

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Today -100: June 28, 1926: Wait, and hear me out, what if we use the Navy to protect the negro’s ballot?

Gen. Manuel Gomes da Costa, the leader of last month’s coup in Portugal, declares himself supreme ruler. All political prisoners will be exiled.

The NAACP launches a $1m fund to fight Jim Crow laws. NAACP Exec. Sec. James Weldon Johnson says “The federal government will use a navy to prevent a man from taking  a drink, but will not empower a deputy marshal to protect the negro’s ballot.”

The manufacture of horsewhips dropped 58.5% in 1925 over 1923.

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Today -100: June 27, 1926: Of gold, kluxers v. gypsies, and parole

Incoming French Finance Minister Joseph Caillaux sacks Georges Robineau, the governor of the Banque de France who opposed the use of France’s gold reserves to defend the franc. Caillaux says Robineau had often expressed a desire to retire; Robineau denies this.

Austrian Socialist MPs stalk out of Parliament to protest it electing Anton Rintelen, the former governor of Styria, as minister of education, calling him a fascist, which is not wrong.

A group in Klan kostumes shoot up a Gypsy camp in Westchester Cty, New York.

New York criminals are hastily pleading guilty to get into Sing Sing before Wednesday, when parole laws change.

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Today -100: June 26, 1926: Atlantis located, without even the benefit of Google Maps

Republicans are in disarray over Congress’s failure to pass a bill to aid farmers. Coolidge supports the Fess plan, involving aid to a cooperative marketing bureau, which is dead in the water.

German archaeologist Prof. Paul Borchardt says he’s figured out where Atlantis was: the Sahara Desert in Tunisia. It sank in an earthquake. Before that, it went to war with Egypt or something, dunno, stopped reading.

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Today -100: June 25, 1926: Let the males have one place in the country where they can live in peace

Spain arrests 30 lawyers, journalists, army officers, etc. Evidently a conspiracy has been uncovered to... issue a manifesto calling for the restoration of constitutional rights.

The Senate Campaign Fund Investigating Committee questions Pittsburgh Police Superintendent Peter Paul Walsh, who admits having ordered detectives to get out the vote for John Stuchell Fisher and George Pepper, the Republican candidates for governor & US Senate respectively. And by “admits,” I mean Walsh lies about it until the letter he wrote to the Detective Bureau inspector is read out to him. And when I say “wrote,” he insists, “I did not write it Senator. The stenographer wrote it, but I signed it.” “And you dictated it?” “Yes sir.” (The letter, by the way, was stolen from the Detective Bureau by some whistleblower and delivered to the Committee). He claims neither candidates’ campaigns asked him to issue that order. The Committee has also been examining the large amounts of money the Anti-Saloon League inserted into the primaries.

The British House of Lords rejects by a vote of 125 to 80 a measure to allow peeresses to sit in the Lords.  “Let the males have one place in the country where they can live in peace,” exclaims Baron Banbury. Lord Cecil notes that the claim that women aren’t up to the physical strains of being a Member of Parliament hardly applies to the Lords.

Britain’s oldest general is Sir George Higginson, age 100, Crimean War vet.

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Today -100: June 24, 1926: Maybe someone got him a beard for his birthday

Evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson reappears. Believed to have drowned in the ocean a month ago, she claims to have actually been kidnapped and drugged and held for ransom in a shack in Mexico, then escaped when her kidnappers left her by herself. There are plenty of details I won’t go into, but there’s a good chance this is total horseshit.

Aristide Briand forms a government. The finance minister will be Joseph Caillaux for the umpteenth time.

Italy threatens to stop participating in the League of Nations unless anti-Fascist meetings are banned in Geneva. Swiss Foreign Minister Giuseppe Motta points out that a recent incident was caused by Fascists trying to disrupt an anti-Fash meeting.

Edward, Prince of Wales turns 32. “At the same age King Edward [VII] had a beard and was a father.” He goes to a horse show, as was the custom.

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Today -100: June 23, 1926: In the long run

Philadelphia Mayor Freeland Kendrick, who is also president of the Sesquicentennial Exposition, denies the Ku Klux Klan a parade license and bans them from using the Sesquicentennial Auditorium. Kleagle Paul Winter says “They will pay in the long run, all right.”

Someone else who won’t be participating: Bishop Joseph Berry of the Methodist Episcopal Church, who resigns from the Exposition committee because it will be open on Sundays such as July 4th.

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Today -100: June 22, 1926: Of taxes & budgets

Coolidge says it will be a while before taxes can be reduced again, even as budget cuts, with more budget cuts planned, are increasing the size of the surplus, because who knows what could happen by 1928. I mean, who even knows?

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Today -100: June 21, 1926: Gross ingratitude is the worst kind of ingratitude

Édouard Herriot fails to form a new French government; Aristide Briand gets another chance.

There’s a “riot” in Garfield, New Jersey, where the (Passaic-area) textile strike is in its 21st week. And by riot I mean cops attack a crowd that refuses their order to disperse. The crowd gets especially riled when the cops arrest a woman with 3 children, including a baby. The Garfield police have been recruiting special policemen, but the majority refuse to take their oath upon finding that the pay is only $23 a week.

The German referendum to confiscate the property of former ruling families in Prussia and other states (4 kings, 6 grand dukes, 5 dukes, 7 princes, etc) receives 96% of the vote, but the turnout is only 39%; 50% is required. So the monarchists win by boycotting the vote. A private letter from Pres. Paul von Hindenburg “leaked,” calling the measure “a deplorable lack of traditional feelings and an act of gross ingratitude.” Many people thought his intervention unseemly.

British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’s son Oliver comes out as a Spiritist. He’s seen ghosts and everything.

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Today -100: June 20, 1926: Makin’ beer

Rep. Fiorello La Guardia makes some beer in his D.C. office by combining two legal products, a near-beer and a malt extract, to create beer with a 2.84% alcohol content, and giving it out. Experts pronounce the beer fine, but the Prohibition Unit says you’d get sick well before you got inebriated, something about solids.

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Today -100: June 19, 1926: In which is revealed what offends the moral sense

Stuff I should have been talking about earlier: The Pennsylvania elections this month, specifically the Republican gubernatorial and US Senate primaries, which in this very Republican state are the only ones that matter, were tremendously corrupt and tremendously expensive. They’re being investigated by the Senate. Gifford Pinchot, term-limited out of the governor’s office, lost the Republican primary for US Senate to Rep. William Scott Vare, but I’m sure there’ll be no hard feelings. American Federation of Labour Pres. William Green is pissed that someone forged a letter of him endorsing John Stuchell Fisher for governor; the Fisher campaign paid for an ad in the Pittsburgh Gazette-Times featuring the forgery.

A NYT editorial thinks the candidates (at least Pepper & Vare) were unaware of what was going on, placing the blame on the donors: “what offends the moral sense [is] the spirit in which rich men set out to win a political contest by means of long purses. ... the callous indifference, the sublime unconsciousness of doing anything wrong ... The real Pennsylvania scandal is the fact that Pennsylvania did not seem to know that it was doing anything scandalous.”

The leader of last month’s coup in Portugal, Gen. Manuel Gomes da Costa, fires Adm. José Mendes Cabeçadas, who the coup leaders appointed president & prime minister. Gomes da Costa will take both posts as well as minister of war. Martial law is declared.

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Today -100: June 18, 1926: Excessive offensive American propaganda is the worst kind of propaganda

Spanish Foreign Minister José de Yanguas says Spain will withdraw from the League of Nations since it turned out to be “an organization of war.”

Brown University is no longer Baptist; trustees and the U. president will no longer be required to be Baptist.

Australian censors ban King Vidor’s film The Big Parade for “excessive offensive American propaganda.”

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Today -100: June 17, 1926: Not everyone loves a parade

More voters in Ridgewood, New Jersey cast ballots in a referendum on a “mutt ordinance” which drops the inoculation requirement but bans unvaccinated dogs outside unless muzzled than voted in the congressional, Assembly or coroner races. The mutt ordinance passes. In other news, “mutt ordinance” is just fun to say. Mutt ordinance mutt ordinance mutt ordinance.

The Soviet Union has supposedly made a grant of $10,000 to the Pasteur Institute in French Guinea for an attempt at artificial hybridization of the human and anthropoid species, to prove evolution. Um, okay. This news comes from Detroit lawyer Howell England of the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism (if you were wondering what comes after Alcoholics Anonymous and the American Automobile Association), who says Dr. F. G. (Francis Graham) Crookshank, author of The Mongol in Our Midst, thinks orangutans can breed with the yellow race, gorillas with the black race, and chimps with the white race, producing fertile hybrids.

Mayor Frank Hague of Jersey City refuses the Ku Klux Klan a parade permit. He says their demonstrations usually lead to rioting. Mayor Harvey Kistler of Niles, Ohio also refuses to issue kluxers a parade permit.

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Today -100: June 16, 1926: Had I fired I should not have missed

American Impressionist painter Mary Cassatt, who lived most of her life in France, dies at 82. Do the words “created a type of sturdy wholesomeness and naturalness” make you eager to seek out her work?

Another death of note: Catherine Evans, 91 or possibly 81, an actress who played the maid in “Our American Cousin” the night Lincoln was shot and therefore witnessed the assassination..

French Prime Minister Aristide Briand and his Cabinet resign, as was the custom (this was his 9th or 11th or something premiership, who can keep count), because of the franc’s fall.

The Coast Guard fires on the yacht of millionaire Arthur Curtiss James (the NYT identifies him as a former commodore, without noting that his commodorial service was in the New York Yacht Club) in the Long Island Sound, mistaking it in the fog for a rum-runner.

Not sure when the duel between Poland’s former PM Count Aleksander Skrzyński and Gen. Count Stanisław Szeptycki changed from the planned sword fight to pistols at 15 paces. The general fires first, missing, but Skrzyński refuses to shoot. “I shall not resort to this stupid, inconclusive and barbaric method of settling a quarrel which has been forced upon me.” He slightly undercuts this by adding “Had I fired I should not have missed. But I don’t care to do so.” By the way, the general tried to avoid the duel which he provoked, but was forced to go through with it by a “court of honor,” which is a thing.

The estate of the late Lucien Warner is much reduced because of write-offs as the result of the decline in popularity of the product his firm manufactured, corsets.

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Today -100: June 15, 1926: Boy, there’s a Brazilian joke here somewhere

Headline of the Day -100:

Some dude named Gary, probably. 

Brazil does indeed resign from the League of Nations, effective in two years by LoN rules.

Catherine Scott, who planned to raise funds for her husband’s insanity defense by fasting in a glass cage, is stopped by the police under a law forbidding the exhibition of the results of crime.

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Today -100: June 14, 1926: Of army chiefs, falling ceilings and parades

Marshal Józef Piłsudski, who led that coup in Poland, cements his power-behind-the-throne position, being granted the status of Commander in Chief of the Armies for life rather than War Minister, so not removable by the government or Parliament or anybody.

The White House roof is in danger of falling down, Coolidge’s church’s plaster is falling down, and the movie theater in which that church is now holding services also has pieces come crashing down during services. Someone is trying to tell Coolidge something.

At the Sesquicentennial Exposition in Philadelphia (have we heard Trump say the word semiquincentennial yet?), the governors of the original 13 colonies will meet today and watch a parade. But is there even a cage match?

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Today -100: June 13, 1926: Of escape schemes, fasters, voting ages, and buttons

Charles Ponzi, who was supposed to be reporting to prison, has disappeared.

Mexico bans teachers & professors from participating in politics.

While her husband Russell Scott’s mental state is being evaluated in Chicago to determine if he can be executed for killing a drug store clerk during a hold-up (he was found insane, then he was found sane, and now there’ll be another hearing), wife Catherine is raising funds by fasting in a glass cage and charging admission.

The Bavarian Diet raises the voting age for state & local elections to 25, the Judiciary Committee asserting that youths take little or no interest in politics until they have family responsibilities. The voting age for federal elections, which is set by the federal government, remains at 21.

At the annual Mennonite conference, the younger generation call for end to the ban on buttons.

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Today -100: June 12, 1926: Of smuggling, strike funds, chimneys, and opium

An American Express employee tries to smuggle 13 ancient paintings out of Italy in the baggage of Cardinal Bonzano, who the smugglers figured wouldn’t notice that he was now traveling with 24 trunks instead of 23. The cardinal is “evidently annoyed at the attempt to use the Vatican mission to defraud the Italian Government.”

Britain complains to the Soviet Union about it having sent funds to support the General Strike™. They’re still sending money to the striking miners, so there may be another jolly stern note about that. The Soviet government replies that it has never contributed to any British strike funds, neglecting to add that it’s official Soviet unions which are doing so. The secretary of the miners’ union points out that American miners have also sent money but no one’s bitching about that.

The Coolidges will delay White House repairs, which will necessitate the family moving out, until next March when Congress disbands, despite the imminent danger of the roof falling on their heads. Cal wants civilian engineers to look at it because “army engineers would want to tear down the White House to repair a  chimney.”

India will end the export of opium, except for medical purposes, by stages by 1935.

Rabies is spreading in the Moscow region.

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Today -100: June 11, 1926: Of prohibition and Fascists fashing

House Republicans don’t plan to move forward at this time with the Coolidge Admin’s bill to tighten Prohibition enforcement and penalties.

Fascist Italy closes all local news agencies, leaving just 2 or 3 of “proved moral and financial integrity.”

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